The great economist John Maynard Keynes, whose ideas inspired the New Deal, once famously said: “In the long run we are all dead.” This quotation illustrates two problems with Global Climate Change as an issue facing our government and our people.

First, it is a long run problem. While the harm to the environment is happening now, and while there are some signs of a bleak future to come, it is difficult to get citizens who are consumed with the everyday struggles of life, and those moments of relaxation and pleasure in between, to focus on something whose worst consequences are in the future.

Second, the ideology of the free market, which Keynes counseled against, is very powerful. Saying the Invisible Hand of the market will fix everything tends to absolve us of responsibility to act. By definition, however, the market cannot fix Global Climate Change unless the price of every product was raised in an appropriate amount to reflect its damage to the environment. Lots of products we like would then not be produced.

The science behind Global Climate Change has been known for decades. In the late 1950s, there was a TV show that explained that excessive amounts of carbon dioxide trapped in the atmosphere would overheat the planet, melt the polar ice caps, cause wild fires, etc. All presidents from Lyndon Johnson on have been fully briefed on this issue. During the Reagan administration, a bipartisan coalition was talking about a Green New Deal. Even the petroleum giant Exxon’s research accepted the need to address the causes of Global Climate Change. We reached a treaty to reduce and eliminate the chemicals that were causing the hole in the ozone layer. There was great optimism that a treaty on carbon dioxide emissions would be next. George Bush ran on a program of being the environmentalist president. It was touted as the conservative thing to do. But something went wrong.

Bush had a chief of staff named John Sununu who was the former governor of New Hampshire. While Bush’s EPA administrator William Reilly wanted a treaty to address Global Climate Change, Sununu, a doctrinaire free marketer, squelched the effort.

When Bill Clinton became president, he introduced legislation to tax carbon emissions. By then, however, the petroleum industry and the U.S. Chamber of Commerce had shifted gears and spent millions to defeat the measure. It failed, and the spending of those special interests hasn’t died.

That is the history. Where are we today?

Since the 1960s, the Mauno Loa Observatory in Hawaii has been measuring carbon levels in the atmosphere. Just recently, atmospheric levels of carbon reached 415 parts per million, a concentration researchers say has not existed in more than 3 million years. Those levels existed in the Pliocene Period, when the earth was much hotter, when ocean levels were 90 feet higher, and when human beings did not exist.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has recorded the warmest years on record since 1880. The following years were the hottest on record with the hottest year first.

Two years ago, the commanding officer of West Point addressed the New York State Assembly. She said that Global Climate Change was the greatest threat facing the United States. Aircraft fly to the Arctic and the Antarctic from the Stratton Air Force Base in Schenectady. The pilots will tell you that they can see the ice melting. Yet we continue to focus our attention on Venezuela and Iran. And war, by the way, is a huge contributor to additional carbon dioxide in the atmosphere.

When Keynes said “in the long run we are all dead,” he did not mean to imply that we should take no thought for the morrow. He wanted to create a more stable economy that could work for everyone. The same principle applies here. We need to act now so that we can stabilize our environment for the benefit of my children and yours. Here are some of the policy options:

• A carbon tax.
• A Green New Deal to promote technologies that do not emit carbon dioxide into the atmosphere.
• A rapid phase in of those technologies to replace the technologies of the past that are unsustainable.
• Government assistance to the public in making these changes because few of us can afford it under current economic conditions.

We will need many things in combination if we are going to seriously tackle this problem. To date, there has been a lot of talk. Relatively little attention is given to this issue in our State government. We need to get serious. I am hoping that events like this can get us moving in the right direction.